As Our Tragic Universe is a book about storyless stories, providing a plot summary is next to impossible so I’m going to cheat and use the one from the back of the book this time:

It Kelsey Newman’s theory about the end of time is true, we are all going to live forever.  But who would want that?  Certainly not Meg, a bright spark trapped in a hopeless relationship.  But if she can work out the connection between a wild beast on Dartmoor, a ship in a bottle, the science of time and a knitting pattern for the shape of the universe, she might just find a way out.

Thomas’ novels that I’ve read have never been about the plot so much as they have the ideas contained within it and this one, if you couldn’t already tell from that blurb, is no exception.  In fact, Our Tragic Universe takes this even further by having probably the most plot elements of any of her books so far, none of which really come to anything.  There is Meg’s friend Libby’s unhappy relationship in which she vacillates between her lover and her long term partner, which remains unresolved as the novel draws to a close.  Meg’s own humdrum relationship with her boyfriend, Christopher, which might be a major point in any other book, is a non-issue even after she leaves him in order to concentrate on her work.  Events just sort of take place on the sidelines rather than being important in any way.

Character is similarly unimportant, the most distinctive character in the entire book being Meg’s dog Bess (surely one of the most appealing and lifelike dogs in literature), although an honourable mention goes to Christopher’s brother Josh.  It is interesting that these are both secondary characters however, and none of the people that one might expect to be significant and well developed are particularly distinguishable.

The important part of Our Tragic Universe is the bizarre theories and philosophies that it contains.  With Thomas’ books it is impossible to say at what point unlikely fact becomes improbably theory and improbable theory becomes crazy fiction, but frankly I never care because it’s all so confusing and fascinating at the same time.  In this particular instance, the theory is that at the end of the universe there will be so much energy compressed into such a small space that it will be used to create a new universe in which everyone who has ever lived will exist eternally.  This leads on to questions about the point of existence and the nature of reality and, as in The End of Mr. Y, these theories somehow end up being linked to literature and fiction, what it is and what it does:

In Newman’s never-ending universe there’d be time to write an infinite amount of novels, and even finish reading all the books I’d ever begun, and all the books I’d never begun.  But who’d care about fiction any more?  We only need fiction because we die.

Later on, Meg and a friend debate the comparative merits of unpredictable storyless stories over familiar, formulaic fiction:

You should read Aristotle again, because he tells you not just how to write those bottle-of-oil stories, but proper, meaningful tragedies.  And yes, they’re predictable too, sort of.  But he says that one of the key things the writer has to do is to make the person who hears or reads the story feel astonished, even though the story itself has a formula and is written in accordance with cause and effect.  It’s a great art to make someone surprised to see the picture, and even more surprised when they realise they had all the pieces all along.

This is a rather apt quotation as, abstract as this novel is, it does feel a bit as though Scarlett Thomas essentially writes the same book over and over again, possibly for the very reason that it is the ideas which drive her books rather than the more usual forces of plot and character.  All of the narrators feel as though they are variations on Thomas herself (the author gave up smoking while writing this book and ate a lot of clementines instead, so naturally Meg does the same) and you could replace the name ‘Meg’ with the name ‘Ariel’ in this book and it would slot quite happily into The End of Mr. Y without there being any jarring character differences.  However, strangely, I don’t mind this at all.  Because, as these books don’t feel as though they’re written for plot and characters, I don’t read them for those things.  I read them for the wonderful, imaginative, crazy ideas that Thomas has and that she continues to experiment with and expand with each of her books that I encounter.  These never fail to surprise, for all the reader has the pieces all along.

Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas.  Published by Canongate, 2011, pp. 428.  Originally published in 2010.

The Circle Cast aims to fill in the gap between the time when Morgan is first seen as the daughter of Ygraine and Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, and when she later reemerges as Arthur’s seductress and the mother of Mordred, his eventual downfall.  How does a young girl who is sent into exile, either for her own protection or simply to keep her out of the way as Uter Pendragon begins a passionate relationship with her mother, become a powerful and vengeful sorceress?

Perhaps because Alex Epstein chooses to address Morgan le Fay’s childhood, an area of the legends which is not traditionally covered (in fact, only The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley springs to mind) and so is able to create entirely new material, I found this book rather enjoyable.  It used a familiar setting and some familiar characters but it didn’t trespass on the traditional stories: it added to them instead and I found this a refreshing and interesting approach.

Morgan, or Anna as she begins the story, is a surprisingly complex character who develops convincingly throughout the course of the novel.  She starts out curious, questioning and vulnerable but quickly acquires a steely resolve and an adult mindset as she is forced to mature by her circumstances.  She’s so controlled and self-sufficient for much of the book that I don’t find her a particularly sympathetic character, but she’s still really interesting and a great strong female protagonist for a young adult story.  I thought it was particularly poignant and a clever touch that what she works towards in Ireland, unification under one High King, is exactly what Arthur later works towards in Britain.

Of course, approaching such well known stories in any way, even Epstein’s rather oblique one, creates a set of problems for the author and reader.  It can be difficult to create tension an excitement in a story where the reader already knows the ending, and I was well aware that the question posed on the back cover of the book, ‘But when Morgan meets the handsome son of a chieftain, will she choose love or vengeance?‘ was not really a question at all.  Almost everyone reading this book will know that Morgan returns to Britain, seduces Arthur and gives birth to Mordred.  The tension then has to come from the writer either making the reader forget that the conclusion of the novel is inevitable or making the choices that the characters have to make so agonising that the reader wishes there were some other option.  Every time I go to see Blood Brothers I always find myself hoping against hope that this particular time it might end differently, despite all rational thought meaning I know it can’t, so I know that this can be achieved.  in The Circle Cast Epstein manages it as well, by and large, and even though I knew what Morgan would decide her situation was compelling enough that I caught myself wishing that this wasn’t the case.

I also liked the way that, although the reader was never allowed to forget the connection to the Arthurian story, Epstein worked in other stories subsidiary to Morgan’s which provide context.  I particularly liked the story of Luan who wanted to live a Christian life of prayer rather than the life of a chieftain’s daughter.  The way in which she dealt with achieving her aims in a male dominated society provided a contrasting counterpoint to Morgan’s situation which added richness to the story.

However, in spite of my enjoyment of Morgan’s story I have two problems with this book, the first zoological and the second temporal.  They may be relatively minor quibbles but both of them jolted me out of the narrative rather an immersing me further in the story.  Problem number one then.  There are two rather strange wildlife appearances in the novel.  The first is when Anna is travelling by boat across the Irish Sea from Cornwall to Ireland and the following description cropped up:

When Morgan woke they were sailing through a vast flock of pelicans, thousands of them floating on the water, hundreds more reeling above their heads.  One of them dove at the water and came up with a fish.  (p. 58

Now, to the best of my knowledge, there are no pelicans in the Irish Sea, nor have there ever been.  Puffins, yes.  Seagulls, yes.  Pelicans, no.  A quick Google suggests that they don’t come any closer to the British Isles than the extreme south east of Europe.  The other issue was equine, when Morgan discovers a three-toed horse, which she takes as a special creature.  Once again, the best of my knowledge is largely represented by Wikipedia and consultation with some horsey friends, but nevertheless sources seem to agree that equus has one toeand the mesohippus shown on this diagram with three toes horses died out around 40 million years ago, which is a little old for Morgan to be riding one.  I am of course not an expert on historical zoology and this isn’t to say that I’m not wrong; Google, after all, is not infallible.  However, even if these animals are technically correct, they don’t feel as though they fit within the locale and time period that Epstein is evoking and so they would have been better substituted for more typical wildlife which instantly suggests Dark Age Britain.  Edit: Apparently I’m wrong about the horses.  They do occasionally come about as a genetic throwback, and Julius Caesar’s horse Beaucephalus had three toes.  Knowing this, it actually makes Morgan’s three toed mount a rather clever idea rather than a slightly peculiar one, as it places her in a context of great leaders.  Thanks to the author for clearing that one up.

My other problem with the book was the inconsistent timescale: the amount of time that Morgan spends in slavery seems to vary hugely.  When she escapes to join the Christian community, we are told that ‘Morgan tucked into her first proper meal in eight years‘ (p. 142); later she rescues the Greek slave who came to Ireland with her from Cornwall and ‘she could see he was trying to turn the twelve-year-old he had lost into the sixteen-year-old in the white cloth and gold that stood before him’ (p. 240); later still she meets the man who enslaved her and ‘The head on the grass was ten years older’ (p. 244).  Even a brief glance shows that these timings don’t match up, and I wish that some more careful editing had picked this up so that it could be fixed.

With these two exceptions I really enjoyed this novel.  I like Alex Epstein’s writing and I get the feeling that we’d get on rather well if we ever met, and would spend hours geeking out over Arthurian legend.  I hope he continues to write more stories in this vein, perhaps continuing with Morgan’s tale, as I’d really like to read them.

The Circle Cast by Alex Epstein.  Published by Tradewinds, 2010, pp. 300.  Originally published in 2010.

The inspiration behind Far to Go is Alison Pick’s own family history.  Her grandparents were forced to flee from persecution in Czechoslovakia during the Second World War, eventually settling in Canada.  She uses this to create the story of the Bauer family, a priviledged Czech family who are Jewish by birth but don’t really practise their faith.  However, Pavel, Anneliese and their young son Pepik are Jewish enough to become targets as the Nazi occupations spreads across Europe.  The family must try to work out how best to escape and Marta, their non-Jewish nanny, must decide exactly where her loyalties lie.

The Second World War is a subject which is eternally popular (if that’s the right word) in historical fiction and there are a whole host of memoirs and autobiographies from that time, so a book has to try rather hard to stand out amongst so many voices.  Far to Go succeeds because it has a different situation and a different tone to other books that I’ve read in a similar vein.  Where other novels of the Holocaust can be beautifully, elegiacally tragic, bleakly depressing or even ultimately hopeful, Far to Go feels unusually dirty and distasteful in a way which is extremely effective.  This is not a straightforward book but one filled with complex emotions: it is about betrayal which is ultimately understandable, divided loyalties with no possible solution, the physical ache of regret, and bitterness rather than tragedy.  The atmosphere is particularly well created.

The novel also deals with an aspect of the Holocaust which I’ve not really read about before, most of the books I’ve read being set in Germany.  Pick illustrates well how different the situation was in Czechoslovakia, showing the conflict between Germans and Czechs as a more complex level underlying the usual Nazi/Jew dichotomy.  She also chooses to make her characters a family of secular Jews, and in doing so she is able to explore such a variety of different reactions to the persecutions: Pavel becomes more Jewish, driven to explore the faith which makes him an outcast; Anneliese is desperate to throw off the stigma of Jewishness and escape, and Marta the gentile nanny is forced to see her employers in a totally new light.  Marta’s struggle to decide what to do in her situation comes across as very real and human, and I like the fact that she is neither a saint with no thoughts for her own security nor a selfishly motivated traitor.  I’m sure there were many people who felt exactly as Marta did and were just as confused about their sudden change in status, so it feels very believable.

For all its interesting new perspective, this book is not without its flaws.  The four different strands of narrative in quick succession which open the book (a letter from one character, a letter which it’s only later possible to tell is from a different character, a brief first person section with an unidentified ‘I’ and ‘you’, and the main body of the story in third person with different characters again) are initially very confusing.  It’s impossible to tell if these people are all the same, partially the same or all different and there’s no obvious features to link the four sections together.  It is only as the reader progresses through the book that it becomes apparent who is being referred to in each of them, and while this technique can be effective, I found it to be a few too many things at once with which to open a novel.  This mixed structure continues throughout, and while the inclusion of the letters is particularly poignant, I found that it held me at arms’ length from the characters and their actions.  I watched them experience these powerful emotions and although the overall emotional tone of the book was impressively well drawn, as I’ve already stated, I didn’t find myself feeling along with them but observing from a distance.

The other niggle that I had was the use of Czech words and phrases.  The way that they’re sprinkled throughout the text is actually a rather nice touch as it grounds the novel very firmly in one specific place and adds an authentic flavour of Czechoslovakia.  However, the terms used are rarely explained within the context of the story, and having no experience at all of Czech language, Czech food or Czech cutlure I had no idea what all these things being talked about were.  I know that lengthy explanations can sometimes be tedious and laboured to read and if they are words that Pick is used to using because of her Czech heritage then it may just not have come up as an issue, but at least the first time a Czech term occurs it would be nice if there were some sort of explanation of what it means without me having to resort to constant Googling.   The simple expedient of adding a glossary to the end of the book would solve this problem wonderfully.

Far to Go by Alison Pick.  Published by Headline Review, 2011, pp. 314.  Advance review copy.

I was thrilled, then, to receive a free copy of Joseph Jacobs’ More English Fairy Tales, published recently by Pook Press, from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme.  This book is a facsimile of the original 1894 edition of the text, complete with gorgeous illustrations from John D. Batten.  It comprises an impressive eighty seven fairy tales, many of which are variations on better known versions of the stories, such as the many different versions of Cinderella which appear, and all of which are quite short in length.  All in all, it is a lovely collection to read, whether as an adult or a child.

Scrapefoot the Fox

I found the selection of stories really interesting, particularly in instances where they followed a basic outline that was familiar but with some subtle differences.  The story that we all know as ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ appears in this collection as the story of Scrapefoot the Fox, who undergoes similar ursine exploits culminating in his being summarily defenestrated by the irate Bears.  It makes me curious as to how this character was transformed from a male fox into the little girl Goldilocks from the tale more familiar today (apparently by way of being an old woman and then a young girl called Silver-hair, according to the appendix).  Likewise, the well known story of the Pied Piper is altered by moving the setting from Hamelyn to Newtown on the shores of the Solent.  I thought this might perhaps have been a change made by Jacobs, appropriating a foreign tale for his book of English stories, as he does warn in his introduction that ‘I do not attribute much anthropological value to tales whose origin is probably foreign‘ (p. x).  However, Jacobs’ enlightening ‘Notes and References’ section which closes the book reveals that the story aparently made its way over to England with no help from the author, prompting me to wonder once again how this change took place.  I was also delighted to stumble across an early version of what has become one of my favourite folk songs in ‘The Golden Ball’.  A girl is to be hung, but cries out to the hangman:

Stop, stop, I think I see my mother coming!
O mother, hast brought my golden ball
And come to set me free?

She then repeats this, protesting that her father has also come to save her.  However, each time the response is negative:

I’ve neither brought thy golden ball
Nor come to set thee free,
But I have come to see thee hung
Upon this gallows-tree.

Eventually her sweetheart turns up at the final moment with the promised golden ball and saves her.  I first heard this sung while sat in the garden of a pub in Warwick, and fans of the marvellous folk band Bellowhead will recognise this as the song ‘Prickle Eye Bush’, which you can see them performing in all their enthusiastic glory here (seriously, go and watch them).  Although the song tells most of the story itself, it’s still really interesting to find out where it comes from and get a bit of background.

For every old favourite, there are also plenty of new tales.  I particularly liked the Hobyahs and their exploits, a species of interfering fairy folk who were entirely new to me.  The range of different tales and styles is particularly good over the eighty seven stories and I think this would keep the interest of any reader, whether they had a specific interest in the morphology of traditional stories or not.  However, for me it is the appendix which makes this book so interesting.  Here Jacobs explains where all the tales were gathered, any history behind them and how they differ from other know variations.  He strikes the perfect balance between being a storyteller and being an academic folklorist.

It is worth passing comment on the particular edition from Pook Press, as obviously the content of the book hasn’t changed since 1894.  More English Fairy Tales has long since passed into the public domain and you can read the whole thing for free, including the illustrations, on Project Gutenburg and it is available in numerous different versions on Amazon, all of which are facsimiles of the same text and so will look exactly the same as this one.  With that in mind, it’s a shame that Pook haven’t added anything of their own to the book to induce the book shopper to buy this particular version.  It’s a perfectly pleasant little book, but an introduction either from an editor at the company or, even better, from someone who works in the field now or an author who writes modern fairy tales perhaps would have made it stand out a bit more.  Pook state that they are ‘working to republish these classic works in affordable, high quality editions, using the original text and artwork so these works can delight another generation of children’ which is an aim that I find admirable, but I think just a few paragraphs explaining why this work is special, how it fits in with their catalogue and a bit of historical context would have been great.

More English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs, illustrated by John D. Batten.  Published by Pook Press, 2011, pp. 243.  Originally published in 1894.

Recently, I’ve been enjoying an excess of Victorianism.  I read The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, a very unexpected Victorian novel, and then, purely by chance, I ended up simultaneously reading Lady’s Maid by Margaret Forster and The Crimson Petal and the Whiteby Michael Faber (which is still ongoing), both neo-Victorian novels.  While these are all fabulous books, I felt that I needed a change of pace afterwards, and what could be more different than a book about dinosaurs rampaging down Oxford Street and strange Russian scientists.  I was very kindly sent Primeval: Extinction Event by Dan Abnett from the lovely people at Titan Books and I’m glad I waited until now to read it as it proved the perfect antidote to the overexertion of my Victorian sensibilities.

Primeval: Exinction Event is a book based on the popular ITV television series of the same name about anomalies in time that occur, allowing beasts from prehistoric (and apparently also futuristic) times to slip through into the present day and cause havoc.  In this particular installment, following an encounter with an entelodon on Oxford Street, Professor Nick Cutter, paleozoologist for the Anomaly Research Centre, is kidnapped along with his teammates zookeeper Abby and computer whizz Connor.  They are taken to Siberia where they discover that the Russians have a much bigger problem than they do in England, in the form of a forest full of dinosaurs and the terrifying Baba Yaga.  Somehow they must convince the Russians of what is happening and keep themselves alive long enough to sort it out and get home safely, all while time is swiftly running out.

Unlike a lot of people in the UK (including my parents, who were very intrigued when I showed them this book) I have never seen Primeval before; I think it aired while I was at university and without a television, so I never got around to watching it.  Consequently, I came to this book without any prior knowledge of the characters or their situation which isn’t something that I expect will happen with many readers as television spin-off books aren’t something you tend to pick up unless you’ve already watched and enjoyed the series.  However, had I taken that view, I would have missed out on what turned out to be a really good, fun piece of light entertainment.

Primeval: Extinction Event is a lively, fast-paced adventure which easily carries the reader along through a series of unlikely occurrences and their equally unlikely situations.  The book reads exactly how you would expect a television episode to read if it were turned into a book, alternating between action scenes and lots of dialogue.  Abnett writes these conversations in a way that is snappy, witty and that manages to convey large amounts of information without it seeming contrived or intrusive.  I was impressed that the author managed to provide enough detail and backstory for me, a newbie, to be able to grasp what was going on and why without it being painfully obvious that he was doing so.  There were a few small things which I found confusing at first (like the Russians in the book, I also thought that the term ‘anomaly’ referred to the dinosaurs themselves) but as the plot moves so quickly these misunderstandings were soon cleared up.

As this book assumes that readers will already be familiar with the characters from the television series, characterisation is understandably a bit sparse (I wouldn’t expect character studies if I were to read a Doctor Who novel, for example), but this isn’t the sort of novel in which you would expect it anyway, focusing as it does on action over contemplation.  Nonetheless, there was enough differentiation between them for me to feel that I got to know the main cast a little bit and to make them interesting to read about.  I found the inclusion of Cutter’s wife particularly intriguing as I know no back story for it, and I’d like to find out more about what happened with the two of them.  I do think that there were a few too many secondary characters though, many of which were little more than names and so impossible to keep track of.  I can see how this would work on television as you can actually see the characters and they are visibly different, but it didn’t translate well into book form.

My only other criticism is a rather minor one, but it was a constant niggle throughout the book: every time a weapon is mentioned, we must know what model it is.  I fail to see why this is necessary or how it adds to the reading experience.  I highly doubt that the average reader will be able to visualise a specific gun by being given its model number; on television, all we would have seen is an array of different guns and I could quite happily have been told that the team use an array of different guns without knowing what every single one of them was.  I quickly grasped that mechanical things wouldn’t work properly because of the anomalies without knowing the difference between and M-64 and an A-30.  Frankly they all sound like road names to me anyway.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book to someone who hasn’t seen the television show.  What I would recommend is that you sit down and watch the show and then read this book.  That’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Primeval: Extinction Event by Dan Abnett.  Published by Titan Books, 2011, pp. 351.  Review copy.

So far, I haven’t had much luck with the books of which I’ve received free copies for review from Goodreads and LibraryThing.  More often than not, I read the descriptions thinking “Oooh, what an interesting concept!” and eagerly click the request button but the books haven’t really lived up to my expectations when they’ve arrived.  So when Flowers for Alys arrived and I saw that, like my previous early reviewer books, it was self-published, I could feel my heart sinking.  Which just goes to show that I shouldn’t be so prejudiced because I couldn’t have been more wrong about Irene M. Redpath’s book.

Flowers for Alysis set in an unspecified time which I presume is the middle ages in an unspecified place which, again, I presume is England.  It centres around Jenet, a young woman who has a disfigured mouth which renders her mostly unable to talk and hence is also presumed deaf.  Jenet adopts a baby whom she finds lying abandoned by the side of a river, and raises her despite the ensuing difficulties.  As the infant, given the name Fleur, grows up, it becomes clear that she is a remarkable child in a great many ways.

This is a quiet, simple, heartfelt book, which refreshingly abandons lengthy descriptions and elaborate prose in favour of a more straightforward writing style which really suits the little tale that Redpath tells.  For all its simplicity, her writing conveys strong emotions, particularly in the first chapter when we learn the origins of the abandoned baby.  The closing lines of this chapter, intriguingly titled ‘The End’, are heart-wrenching and I think that more complicated prose would have spoiled the impact that they have.  The final chapter, which, in corresponding backwards fashion is titled ‘The Beginning’ was also well written.

Although this book is light on characterisation, at a mere 115 pages I wasn’t expecting in-depth analysis and the somewhat sketchy character profiles are all that is necessary to carry the story.  Jenet is innocent, reliable and homely, and the occasional glimpses inside her head provide an interesting perspective.  Fleur is particularly intriguing in her fey ways, and it would have been nice to see a bit more of her.  I liked the scenes of her being inexplicably drawn to the river where she was found and her strange rituals with flower petals which become so important.

Of course, this book isn’t perfect.  The representation of perceptions of disability in the middle ages is woefully inadequate; I felt as though Jenet’s disabilities were used casually as an excuse to justify her not having married and without consideration for the implications of this.  However, although this was an issue it bothered me less than I expected because the book reads more as a parable with a historical setting than as a strictly historical novel.  I also thought that the magical overtones could perhaps have benefited from some expansion to make them sit better in the story as a whole. 

This was a quick, enjoyable read and I’m really glad to have finally received a self-published book about which I am happy to say that!

Flowers for Alys by Irene M. Redpath.  Published by Lulu, 2010, pp. 116.  First edition.

Author: Darrell Bain

Published: LL-Publications, 2010, pp. 207

Genre: Short stories

Blurb: Oops! is the third collection of stories by Darrell Bain.  When Cupid and a Gremlin bump heads, the sparks fly in a rare fantasy story by the author.  Other stories in the collection include A Simple Idea, and almost ludicrously simple method of eliminating corruption and idiocy from the political process, one that has been around for centuries but gone unrecognized.  Cure for an Ailing Alien finds a nurse who must come up with a cure for an alien, one whose bodily processes are completely unknown.  You’ll be amazed at her cure!  Retribution is the story of unexpected consequences when alien meets human.  Robyn’s Rock is partially based on a happening in the author’s life during a walk with his granddaughter.

There are many more stories in this collection, all written in the individual style that has kept Bain’s readers coming back for more for the past twenty years.  This is a book to add to your collection, stories by a notable, multi-award winning author.

When, where and why: I was sent a copy of this book to review as part of the Goodreads First Reads programme.  I requested it because I enjoy short story collections and the description made this one sound different and intriguing.  I started it at once, as I think it’s only polite to do so when sent a free book.

What I thought:Perhaps I shouldn’t, but I always have very high expectations of short story collections.  The short story is, in my opinion, one of the hardest forms to write because of the restrictions they impose on the author.  In a novel, there can be passages which aren’t as good, and I might forgive a poorly developed story if the characters are fascinating and come alive, or vice versa.  The novel is long enough that I’ll usually find something about it to enjoy even if one or two areas are a bit lacking.  In a short story, however, lapses like this stick out like a sore thumb.  There is no room to hide and no margin for error.  Consequently, I’m in two minds about Oops! because, on the one hand, the stories all had really interesting ideas but, on the other hand, I thought that the writing, though enthusiastic, was a bit weak and so the concepts were let down.

Let me start out with what I liked about this book.  Firstly, I thought that the plot ideas were fresh and interesting, and you can see from the blurb how wide-ranging they were.  Darrell Bain obviously has a very active imagination and I would guess that there are still many other stories lurking in his mind.  I particularly enjoyed Robyn’s Rock, a tale about a girl who has picked up a rock which enables her to predict future disasters, and Samantha’s Talent, a story about a girl who can speak to animals (although chapters have no place in a short story).  I also really liked the little introductions and concluding notes from the author which accompany each story, explaining how he came to write it.  It gives an insight into the author’s way of thinking which is unusual and refreshing.

There were some bits of writing which were well executed, especially Bain’s characterisation of disobedient tractors in Coyote Scare, which:

…I swear were sentient and spent the nights conniving with each other about what kind of trouble they would get me into and how much blood they could make me shed the next day, I had an awful experience on one.  It had nothing to do with any of the tractor’s moving parts, those that spent their time lying in wait for me to come close enough to get bitten or chewed or gouged or gnawed on.  Tractors are savage and evil and should be sold with guards whose duty it is to threaten them with both barrels of a twelve gauge shotgun the minute they get out of line. (p. 40)

Unfortunately, I found this amusing style to be the exception rather than the rule.  I could tell from the writing that Bain obviously really enjoys what he does, but his skills are somewhat lacking.  Dialogue in particular was weak, stilted and unbelievable.  Also, I don’t think I’ve read a story since I was five years old which ends ‘And they lived happily ever after’ in a non-ironic way.  At least two of these do, from what I remember.  I’m all for happy endings, but there are much more elegant ways to express this or indeed demonstrate it so that I can work it out myself without having to be so direct and unimaginative.

The other problem is the editing.  While grammar errors are pleasingly few and far between, there are a few continuity problems which a decent editor should have picked up on.  Perhaps the most glaring was in The Furniture Formula, where cave woman Uga, when her husband dismisses her interior design ideas, says:

All right, but I’ve decided I’m going to sleep on the saber tooth tiger skin for a while.  You can sleep on the bear skin by yourself. (p. 120)

And yet, after caveman Ug agrees for the furniture to be moved:

Uga then moved back to the saber tooth tiger skin and slept with Ug. (p. 120)

How can Uga move back to the saber tooth tiger skin if she’s been sleeping there all along?  The close proximity of these sentences to one another on the same page highlights the issue rather unfortunately.  Nonetheless, with some more careful editing and tightening up of the writing this could be an enjoyable story collection, although probably not one for me.

Where this book goes: I keep all ARC copies that I am sent (well, a grand total of two so far) because I’m very grateful to have received them.

Tea talk: I’ve recently been given an individual coffee filter and some posh ground decaff as I’ve recently lost my long-cultivated resistance to caffeine (sob).  It’s wonderful as, while cheap ordinary coffee is tolerable, cheap decaff is utterly vile, so I’ve been enjoying being able to drink coffee again.

I feel slightly guilty about not giving this book a good review, as I was sent a free review copy through the Good Reads First Reads programme. I really wanted to like it and be able to say nice things about it, but sadly I can’t. This book should have been given a subtitle; it should have been ‘The Breaking of the Shell: How to Improve your Life and Relationships through Active Listening and Responding to your Emotions’. This book was not a novel, but a poorly disguised self-help book masquerading as a novel to lure poor, unsuspecting people who usually wouldn’t touch such a book with a bargepole (such as myself) into reading it.

Perhaps because the storyline isn’t the main point of this book, it is neither very interesting nor particularly tightly written. At times, such as in the case of the dictaphone, it contradicts itself: Alexander initially listens to the recording in order to hear his father’s declaration of love and yet, when listening to the recording on a later occasion, is surprised to hear the very same at the start of the tape as he hadn’t realised it had been recorded. The character of Helen is introduced without any explanation: she is living with Alexander so I assumed she was his wife, then his girlfriend when that didn’t quite work out, until the first person narrator finally sees fit to tell the reader who this person is (his ex-wife, it transpires). Her characterisation is also inconsistent with what the reader is told: Alexander reports that ‘Helen One’ was dejected and self-doubting, whereas ‘Helen Two’ who emerges after the divorce is confident and bright, but it is impossible to tell the difference between the two Helens when reading through the before and after narratives. The miraculous changes in Alexander are similarly underwhelming and unapparent. It is difficult to see ‘the incident with the garden shed’ (yes, those are the exact words used) as the root of all Alexander’s problems when the author has gone to great lengths to establish that his problems with emotions started before this point and moreover when the ‘incident’ is forgotten and never referred to again for fully half the book. His putative change back into someone who is in touch with his emotions also fails because he isn’t enough of a bastard beforehand for this to be anything spectacular; he’s just a bit misguided and whiney. The lack of any particularly dramatic change in any of the characters means that there is no interesting and satisfying dénouement to this book. Instead, it just sort of peters out long after the time when it should have been put out of its misery.

Apparently the exciting climax of this book is supposedly the earth-shattering discovery that listening to other people and engaging with them makes the world a better place and people happier with each other and themselves (something I’m fairly sure most people could tell you without the aid of this book). At the point when this was discovered any attempt at plot that was anything other than a demonstration of how this system works disappeared entirely. Instead, the reader is treated to descriptions of parents listening to their children, businessmen listening to each other and ultimately the government listening to the people, which is admirable but really not very interesting. Had the narrative up to this point been particularly engaging I might have been able to forgive the new age, touchy feely instructions for self-discovery and the incredible lack of subtlety with which the author set about grinding his own personal axes. As it is, I was left disappointed.

The Breaking of the Shell by Barry Durdant-Hollamby.  Published by the art of change, 2010, pp. 334.  First edition.

N.B. This is an old review written in 2010 and posted on Goodreads and LibraryThing before I started keeping track of all the books I read here at Old English Rose Reads.  I’ve decided to keep copies here so that this remains a complete record of my reading since I started reviewing books for my own pleasure.